“It’s not Harry Potter,” writes Rob “Instant Mentor” Weir at Inside Higher Education.
Students register surprise when I confess that I share some of their frustrations over academic writing. Quite a few scholars are dreadful writers. There is, in my view, entirely too much pretentiousness, jargon, and affected weightiness oozing from journal pages. That’s why the first thing I tell students is to identify their purpose for consulting a professional work. What do they hope to extract? Do they need to learn from the author’s theoretical perspective, or mine the piece for examples? Are they reading it to contribute to a class discussion, or to collect perspectives to use in a paper? These matters determine their reading strategy.
Read the whole thing. It’s short. You can even skim.
I used to tell students that reading academic journals was a bit like getting into a very hot bath with very cold feet. I could guarantee it would hurt quite a bit while they first got their feet wet, but if they eased themselves in, after a bit it would feel great.